Azure Application Gateway is a powerful Microsoft Azure PaaS service that is providing HTTP load balancing, reverse proxy, SSL termination and web application firewall capabilities. It’s very well documented there: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/. However, there a a few not-that-obvious things that could be easily missed in the provided documentation. I recently spent some time working with Azure […]

By far, the most convenient way to configure Azure Application Gateway is to use ARM template. The reasons are: – Application gateway configuration could be really complex, it may have multiple backend server pools, listeners and complicated routing rules – Application gateway is generally slow to configure. It’s not uncommon to wait 10-15 minutes for […]

Azure Traffic Manager is Azure PaaS service which is helpful in the following scenarios: 1. Directing incoming application traffic to the nearest Azure data center 2. Failover to the other Azure data center (DR) in case of a catastrophic failure 3. Distributing traffic between endpoints according to the assigned endpoint weight value In this blog […]

Bower and NPM (Node.js package manager) are really helpful open source tools which are integrating well with new versions of Visual Studio. They allowing to very conveniently download popular script libraries and other client-side scripts, and in the case NPM server-side tools as well. Gulp is a wildly popular build tool which is mostly used […]

Azure Mobile Apps (formerly known as Azure Mobile Services) provide a great cloud based framework for rapid development of mobile applications (which also could be used to develop web applications, when needed). Azure Mobile Apps empower developer with a tools set (both client-side and server-side) helping to tackle on common mobile application development tasks, like: […]

I recently ran into an interesting issue when developing a connector for a third-party API. When trying to connect to the API endpoint, I received the following error message: “An error occurred while making the HTTP request to https://<API endpoint>. This could be due to the fact that the server certificate is not configured properly […]

One of the compelling features of Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is its extensibility. Although SQL Server comes with a wide array of SSIS components (including different data sources, transformation tasks and logical flow control operations), sometimes there is a need to do something unique in your SSIS package, something that is not supported […]

This is my sixth blog post covering Windows 10 IoT Core. Previous posts: Part 1: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/windows-10-iot-editions-explained/ Part 2: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-what-you-need/ Part 3: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-setting-up/ Part 4: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-hello-world/ Part 5: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-public-display/ In previous blog post we development a Raspberry Pi 2 application which could be used to present a slideshow on a big public display (outdoor or indoor). […]

This is my fourth blog post covering Windows 10 IoT Core. Previous posts: Part 1: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/windows-10-iot-editions-explained/ Part 2: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-what-you-need/ Part 3: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-setting-up/ So, you set up your development environment, assembled, connected and set up Raspberry Pi 2. Now you can create your first IoT application. First, head to Visual Studio 2015 and create a project […]

This is my third blog article covering Windows 10 IoT Core. Part 1: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/windows-10-iot-editions-explained/. Part 2: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/iot-development-with-windows-10-and-raspberry-pi-what-you-need/ By now we got development environment all set up (installed Windows 10 production release, enabled development mode, installed Visual Studio 2015 and IoT templates). We also set our mind on specific board which we’ll be using: Raspberry Pi […]

This is my second blog article covering Windows 10 IoT Core. See the first part here: https://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2016/01/windows-10-iot-editions-explained/. So, you decided to develop your first IoT (embedded) application using Windows 10 IoT Core. Awesome! What do you need for that? Surprisingly, not that much. First, you need a device, a IoT board. At the moment, Windows […]

Windows has a long history of deployments outside of traditional desktop (or laptop) computers. Embedded versions of Windows existed for a long time, powering check registers, kiosks, outdoor displays and even car entertainment systems. Pretty much every version of Windows is recent times had it’s embedded incarnation (XP, 7, 8 and now 10). The OS […]

Azure storage service supports two types of blobs (blob, or BLOB, stand for Binary Large OBject, i.e. an unstructured binary data): block and page blobs. Blob type is selected when blob is created and then it can’t be changed. Although both blob types allow for storage of large binary objects in Azure, they are optimized […]

In real life cloud deployment scenarios one of the very common cases is when only part of the application resides in the cloud. Usually, it’s when there is a legacy system which can’t be migrated to the cloud and resides on premises, or it’s not optimal to deploy entire system to the cloud. After all, […]

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is very similar to on-premises SQL Server, but there are a few key differences. One of these difference is that SQL Azure doesn’t support integrated authentication (i.e. when caller is identified by its domain account). I assume this is a technical limitation which could be explained by the lack of domain […]

When you creating a new web app (or web site, how it used to be called until recently) it’s have “Always On” setting off by default, which means the web site will be recycled after period of inactivity (20 minutes). This setting is somewhat similar to “Idle Time-out” setting on IIS application pool.When you web […]

Today, during annual Microsoft Build conference keynote, Microsoft’s own Scott Guthrie (executive VP of cloud and enterprise group) introduced new Azure service which is going to be available in public preview in June: Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Large enterprise today can’t effectively function without big data realtime analytics. Realtime analytics means processing large amounts of […]

About a week ago Azure DocumentDB, a new Microsoft’s entry into NoSql database market, become generally available. DocumentDB allows user to to store/update/delete arbitrary objects (as complex as needed, not limited by relation structure) and query these objects using a special (quite limited) flavor of SQL (yes, SQL!) or LINQ when it’s used from .NET. […]